Free Run Between the Raindrops by Dale A. Dye Page B

spirit of the People’s Army and a full-face gas mask of the sort I’ve seen dopers in the rear turn into what they call a grass-mask. Stuffing the enemy gear in my pack, I head for the building and duck inside. The air is thick with dust and cordite through which grunts are running in all directions. It seems the safe bet is just to stay out of the way for a while, so I slump down against a marble bench and catch my breath.
    Two grunts suddenly appear in the broad main corridor of the building, walking backwards and dragging two gook bodies. They head for the entrance and then fling the rumpled forms out onto the front steps for the security squads to examine. I hear a ragged line of cheers erupt from the grunts in the courtyard. Hotel Company has captured a major objective in Hue, a key piece of urban terrain and that’s a story, so I rise to find someone who can tell me about it.
    Sprawled along a series of polished marble hallways throughout of the Treasury Building, live grunts are doing what they always do after a firefight: Smoking or munching on something saved in a pack or pocket, sucking on canteens, staring at their boots, the opposite wall or the ceiling. They scrutinize anything but each other. In another couple of minutes, the ringing in their ears will clear. They’ll accept the fact that they survived again and the trash-talk will commence. Safe for a precious few minutes, they will critique the fight, focusing on the dark, near-fatal moments when somebody fucked up and got away with it.       
    Code of The Grunt . If you can’t say something funny about a shitty situation, don’t say anything. Keep the emotions buried until everyone comes to believe you don’t have any. The thing to be—the thing to look like when anyone is looking—is just another grunt motherfucker who doesn’t give a shit. There it is.
    It starts with a PFC in horn-rimmed glasses, reloading his rifle magazines and yelling at another Marine sitting across the hall munching on a C-ration candy bar. Because neither one can hear very well, the exchange is made in high, croaking shouts.
    “You the dude that pounded that cocksucker up topside with the LAAW?”
    “Me and Blooper Man blew that motherfucker right out of his jock. You dudes find the leftovers up there?”
    “We seen four of them assholes lying around in the area where you put the round. But they wasn’t the same ones had us pinned down outside yesterday.”
    “How the fuck do you know that?”
    “There was three more of ’em up there smelled like they been dead for a while. We got them motherfuckers yesterday is what I think. You got their replacements.”
    Another grunt enters the conversation in mid-quibble. “Who gives a shit? You got ’em, we got ’em; what fucking difference does it make as long as they’re dead?”
    There’s more but I wander away from it. The littered, blasted hallways inside the Treasury Building are taking on the atmosphere of a locker room after the big game which is no surprise. Most of these guys aren’t long out of high school and some of them are still coping with combat like they would a football or basketball game. That won’t last long.
    Steve is propped up against a marble archway sucking on a canteen. He offers me a hit and lets me know his story notes plus a couple of rolls of film are on their way to Phu Bai. “I found a dude they were medevacing for pneumonia. He promised to drop the shit off on his way to the hospital.”
    He was in on the initial assault, right there with the leading squads, but he doesn’t have much to say about it. “Bitch-kitty, gooks everywhere tucked in little cubbyholes and all over the upstairs.” That’s it. From the blood pools, scorch-marks, wounded Marines and shell-casings scattered everywhere there was clearly a whole hell of a more to it than that, but he’s not in a mood to expand or expound. When I probe, he simply holds up an empty cloth bandolier draped over his shoulder.